Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story”: film release, trailer and review

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VMaybe the whistle will start. That everything is the same and different. With the whistle and with what you see.

Back then, sixty years ago, there was an almost blank canvas, orange with lines on it. The lines were there until you were on the verge of losing patience or suspecting a bug in the demonstration system. Until you recognized a silhouette. The silhouette of Manhattan. A promise. And even the whistle, first upwards, then plunging downwards with a slight sigh, still had hope. A deceptive one. At least that’s how you could hear it.

None of that now. No lines, no orange. A huge black ball. It hangs over New York’s West Side like a dark moon. It looks like after a world war, which of course never happened here. Like Dresden. A bit like the ruins of the World Trade Center too. The colors are dramatically cold, brilliant, but strangely desaturated.

And the whistle with which everything starts even before someone starts to snap their fingers and the brutal music machine of the “West Side Story” raging to extremes really hits the ground, the whistle has nothing to do with sighing when it crashes, no hope anymore. He just falls into the abyss. At least that’s how you can hear it.

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Steven Spielberg and Rachel Zegler

Steven Spielberg filmed the “West Side Story”. He once said that he could sing it all the way through and that he did it so often at home as a ten-year-old, until it really annoyed his parents. That he always dreamed of staging a musical for the screen, too. At least at first glance, he could hardly have made it much harder than with what Robert Wise wrote in 1961 from the then four-year-old Broadway play by the four Jews Leonard Bernstein (music), Stephen Sondheim (lyrics ), Arthur Laurents (book) and Jerome Robbins (choreography).

At the time, the four of them saw things only with reservations (complained about the costumes and the cast of Tony, the tragic hero of this Romeo and Juliet paraphrase, and the fact that Natalie Wood, as Maria, played Puerto Rican Juliet in the tragedy, wasn’t really Hispanic and couldn’t sing). For the vast majority of the rest of the film posterity, “West Side Story” (perhaps – formally a Singspiel – the only true American opera) is flawless.

Ansel Elgort as Tony and Rachel Zegler as Maria

Ansel Elgort as Tony and Rachel Zegler as Maria

Quelle: © 2021 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved. /Niko Tavernise

An eternal tissue shredder. The electrifying and accomplished breakthrough of a (still today) often smiled at, traditional American theatrical art form into cinematic world consciousness, a socially critical entertainment masterpiece. So why a remake? In addition, one of a piece of which – the experience of at least European follow-up and update attempts in the back – can at least suspect that every iota of change had to be fought for with the right holders with knives and pistols, like the Sharks and the Jets every inch of the streets of Manhattan.

Steven Spielberg actually didn’t do anything with the song game that originally – it was in the late forties – should have played out in the East Side and between Jewish and Irish Catholic late adolescents. Almost nothing and yet everything. Spielberg and his screenwriter Tony Kushner did not transport their gang war anywhere, not to another place, not to another time. Staying on the West Side is a journey back into a past that will probably remain darn topical in the future.

America’s wrecking ball

Spielberg and Kushner have focused the background. That of the quarter and that of the characters. Today that would be called gentrification. What happens to the apartment blocks of the Jets – the children of white immigrants who have dreamed the American dream for generations without ever actually making it – and the Sharks – the Puerto Rican new immigrants, whose doubts about the prospects of their pursuit of happiness in “América” ​​are already not very big. The wrecking balls are destroying the West Side block by block, causing an Armageddon from which the Lincoln Center is to grow like a satellite town.

Both are ousted. Everyone loses. If they got together, maybe something could still be changed. Racism, prejudice and highly toxic masculinity do not allow that. The rooms are getting narrower. In the end, three boys are dead. For women who dream more blatantly, who know better about reality, nothing remains than to do what they can only do in male-poisoned societies – mourn. In any case, the place that everyone dreams of, that there is somewhere where everyone can live, can be free, as in that America that everyone is talking about, does not exist.

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It doesn’t take long to understand that. You actually understand it as soon as you see the first of the boys dancing through the ruins, in the shadow of the wrecking ball through the debris that was once their home. So about shortly after the whistle. Spielberg and Kushner never tire of illuminating the social and political conditions that drive their story into tragedy. The brain-burned machismo, the everyday racism, the false promises of happiness, the social impermeability, the hatred of people whose gender is shimmering, the pre-emancipatory straitjacket that gave women no chance at life – everything as it was.

Spielberg’s “West Side Story”, for example, accusing itself of an outdated image of women, as particularly aroused contemporaries promptly did, now bears witness to the usual ahistorical thinking of the supposedly particularly enlightened. But that’s just by the way.

Gustavo Dudamel at the desk helps sharpen the edges of this piece. Extracts the last of the energy from the engine room of Bernstein’s score. So hard and cracking, so beguiling and unkitschy beautiful, so clear and tense, slim and strong-nerved you have (almost) never heard it.

„West Side Story“ 2021

„West Side Story“ 2021

Quelle: Photo by Niko Tavernise

It is sung very nicely – Rachel Zegner in particular, looking fragile, sounding larger than life. The dancing is almost more beautiful. You want to get up and join in. It’s about life and death. You have to apologize a bit to Richard Beymer, who they thought was pale at the time, who almost disappeared in the brightly colored fighting game of 1961. Ansel Elgort’s Tony is now carrying a light fatsuit from Biographie with him, unfortunately you can still imagine where Maria is and this Bauspar contract popper would have remained in the end, it would have turned out differently.

The fact that Rita Moreno, Anita from 1961, is allowed to take part again naturally moves one to tears. She is the warm heart of this story. She is Tony’s Hispanic foster mother, who eventually died away from her gringo and lived in pain ahead of what Maria and Tony would have faced with a happy ending.

Rita Moreno als Valentina

Rita Moreno als Valentina

Quelle: 20th Century Studios

Tony Kushner invented them for the new version. “There’s a place for us”, she sings and of course she knows better for a long time. There was no place for a Latina who loves an Irish Catholic white. There probably still isn’t one. Whether there will ever really be one, whether the racism that is grinning at you extremely topically through the gorges of this “West Side Story” will ever come to an end, one can doubt. Too little has happened since 1957.

Hispanics are finally being played by real Hispanics. Nobody was stained dark (like Natalie Wood, who had neither Hispanic roots nor really sang in 1961). The cut is brilliant. It’s filmed fantastic. The pictures suck you into this blistering cold world. If the “West Side Story” had to be re-filmed, it would have been better not to. The question of whether it really had to be is on a completely different page. Probably not in spite of everything.

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